It should come as no shock that the Rhode Island Senate today unanimously approved legislation that encourages out-of-court settlements in the 38 Studios lawsuit. The news comes from a syndicated Associated Press report. The bill, which was floated to lawmakers by Governor Lincoln Chafee's office earlier this month and supported by the lead attorney representing the Rhode Island Economic Corp.

A U.S. District Court in California has dismissed a class action lawsuit that tried to take Take-Two Interactive and its subsidiary Rockstar Games to task for the delayed launch of the multiplayer component for Grand Theft Auto V - Grand Theft Auto Online.

The lawsuit (McMahon v. Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. et al., C.D. Cal. Case No. 5:13-cv-02032-VAP-SP) was filed on October 4 by Bruce McMahon and Christopher Bengtson, but later moved to the federal court in mid-November.

A former postal worker pled guilty in federal court in Boston Tuesday to stealing more than 200 video games from mail he handled. The 68-year-old Dorcestor, Mass. man, James L. White, stole the games from the mail between July and November 2012 from packages at the US Postal Service’s General Mail Facility in Boston. He then resold the items to a video game retailer (we assume a local GameStop). White is scheduled to be sentenced for mail theft (a federal crime) on May 8.

According to an Associated Press report, lawmakers in the state of Rhode Island are doing everything they can to fast track a bill that would make it easier for the Economic Development Corp. to settle its lawsuit against executives from 38 Studios and other parties being sued on behalf of the state.

A U.S. Federal Court judge has overturned the findings of a federal jury who ruled in favor of original Madden programmer Robin Antonick against Electronic Arts back in July of 2012. The jury came to the conclusion that Antonick, who served as the original programmer for the game since its first game until 1996, was owed royalties because subsequent games after his departure from the company used the same features created by the programmer when the game was first developed. 

Attorney Max Wistow, the lawyer who is representing the Economic Development Corp. in its lawsuit against 38 Studios executives and others involved in the deal, said yesterday before a Rhode Island Senate committee that money that could be recouped by the state is instead being spent on the ongoing court battle by multiple parties. He also claimed that 11 of the defendants in the case have "insurance policies that pay defense costs out of the policy limits."

"The resources to recover in the lawsuit are every day diminishing," he told Rhode Island lawmakers.

According to a report in the San Francisco Gate, a former video game executive has been sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of $5,000 for secretly copying and selling games for his own profit.

The 48-year-old man named David Foley pled guilty in January 2012 to conspiracy to defraud the company, Global VR of San Jose, and a bank.

Blizzard launched the beta test of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft this week, even as it prepared to sue a copycat game running on iOS and Android being served to gamers in China.

According to MMO Culture, Blizzard and its partner in the region NetEase have filed a lawsuit in China's courts alleging that the iOS and Android game Legend of Crouching Dragon seems to have borrowed core elements from Hearthstone including its card designs, values and game mechanics.

Earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) attempt to become a party to a lawsuit regarding the rights of the NCAA and other entities to use athletes’ likeness in video games, publicity purposes, and other materials.

Max Wistow, the attorney representing the Rhode Island Commerce Corp. (formerly known as the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp.) said that he has had settlement talks in the case against 38 Studios. He says that the Rhode Island General Assembly should pass a new bill announced last week that encourages out-of-court resolutions.

"There's been enough discussion to make it clearly worthwhile to have the legislation passed," he said.

Wistow would not discuss who specifically he might have been talking to about a settlement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the National Security Agency's claims of secrecy on information that has already been widely released due to leaks by Edward Snowden are overblown and no longer "secret." The advocacy group made its comments in an official response in its ongoing court battle with the agency over the unconstitutionality of its surveillance programs.

The U.S. Court of Appeals struck down part of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rules on Net Neutrality today, in a clear victory for Verizon and other service providers who say the agency doesn't have jurisdiction over mobile and broadband.

The United States Court of Appeals has denied Canadian game developer Silicon Knights' attempt to overturn the verdict in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games over its Unreal Engine technology. In a decision last week, the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's ruling that Silicon Knights has to pay Epic $4.5 million in damages - plus legal costs - and destroy all code and products created using the Unreal Engine.

The attorney for former Red Sox Pitcher and 38 Studios founder Curt Schilling says that new documents that were previously withheld by the state of Rhode Island prove that the lawsuit against her client are baseless.

According to a report on Law 360 Nintendo must pay a percentage of its 3DS sales to Tomita Technologies. The company was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff to pay 1.82 percent of the sale cost of every Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL to Tomita Technologies International Ltd., which holds a patent for a glasses-less 3D display. The Judge ruled in December that Nintendo had in fact infringed on the company's patents.

In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) said that National Intelligence chief James Clapper and NSA leaker Edward Snowden should "share a jail cell," intimating that Clapper is as much a criminal as the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower (or traitor depending on what school of opinion you subscribe to). Clapper testified before Congress denying that the NSA was not engaging in supposed dragnet surveillance of American citizens.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has officially appealed a recent decision by a New York District Court Judge that determined that the National Security Agency's (NSA) wide-scale surveillance of mobile phone data was legal and within the confines of the law. The filing with the Federal Appeals Court could ultimately lead to the case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation for information related to the state’s $75-million investment in former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling's 38 Studios video-game company, according to a Providence Journal report.

On Friday a Federal judge in the Southern District of New York court ruled against the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and in favor of the federal government, saying that the National Security Agency's (NSA) spying activities on American citizens is perfectly legal.

Rockstar Consortium (partly owned by Apple and Microsoft), a patent-holding company formed from the bankrupt Canadian telecom company Nortel, sued Google and manufacturers of Android phones over patents almost two months ago. Earlier this week Google punched back at the company, filing a counter-suit seeking to invalidate Rockstar's patents. That's a normal step for a defendant in a patent lawsuit, but Google didn't file its counter-claim in the East Texas court where Rockstar sued them. Instead it filed in Northern California.

Back in June of this year we reported on the plight of 19-year-old Texan Justin Carter, who was arrested back in March for making a terrorist threat online. The incident happened in February of this year. Justin Carter was either playing League of Legends or engaging in a forum conversation when another player wrote a comment calling him insane.

A Winnipeg man pled guilty to a dozen charges last Thursday related to the sale of pirated entertainment products on his Winnipeg-based web site Audiomaxxx.com. The Canadian recording industry called the music and video piracy operation twenty times bigger than anything ever taken down in the country.

Electronic Arts has found itself on the business end of a class action lawsuit related to the numerous bugs, glitches, and technical problems related to Battlefield 4. The game, which launched in November on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One has suffered numerous problems since launch, and while EA and developer DICE have tried to get a handle on things, apparently some investors (not players, surprisingly enough) are so upset that they have decided to take the fight to a court room.

A federal judge ruled on Monday that the NSA's broad and massive surveillance of Americans' phone records is likely unconstitutional, but put aside his decision to allow the government to appeal. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled in a lawsuit brought by a conservative activist named Larry Klayman that the legal challenge to the massive surveillance program would likely succeed on the grounds that it violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States government defended a heavily-redacted response to surveillance requests at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) made by multiple software technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook and LinkedIn. These companies have been petitioning the special court to allow them to disclose government requests. Under the law these companies cannot disclose this information because it has been deemed "classified."

An interesting report in the LA Business Journal (citing a Bloomberg report) says that Activision Blizzard CEO Robert Kotick allegedly threatened to quit as Activision Blizzard’s top executive if the board didn't accept his buyout plan to re-secure Vivendi’s stake in the company. This little morsel of information - which Activision Blizzard has not publicly commented on as of this writing - comes from claims in a shareholder lawsuit over the deal.

Only a few hours after it was revealed that cloud-based file-sharing destination Hotfile has agreed to pay $80 million to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as part of a settlement for a trial set to begin next week, the site went offline. Not only did the site go offline, but it took all of the user content being stored on its servers with it. Users who stored legal personal and business-related documents are now left in much the same situation that Megaupload users were left in, but this time it can't be blamed on anyone except the service provider.

Update: Hotfile has settled the case out of court and has accepted an $80 million judgment, according to Ars Technica.  Hotfile has agreed to pay $80 million and to stop operating "unless it employs copyright filtering technologies that prevent infringement," according to a press release issued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

A federal judge last week ruled that a class action cannot hold Apple responsible for apps on the iPhone and iPad that sold their users' data to advertisers. Jonathan Lalo was the lead plaintiff on a class action filed in 2010 claiming Apple had approved apps for the iPhones and iPads that intercepted personal information and tracked users' habits without authorization.

We have learned two things this week about Treehouse Avatar Technologies. Inc.: first, they are owned by a publicly traded Canadian company called - Wi-LAN Inc. (TSX:WIN, NASDAQ:WILN) and that the company has settled its lawsuit with Turbine. Apparently rather than fighting the accusations that Turbine violated its software patents the makers of D&D Online and The Lord of the Rings Online have opted to enter into a licensing agreement with the firm.